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As expected, Zydrunas Ilgauskas re-signed with Cleveland yesterday after being sent to (and immediately bought out by) Washington at the trade deadline and sitting out the required 30 days before becoming eligible to sign with another the team that dealt him. Obviously, this was orchestrated a long time ago, and obviously it's an attempt to skirt NBA rules about matching salaries in trades... But is there anything wrong with that? Phil Jackson called it a "sham" and Doc Rivers also spoke out against it, but it happens all the time, and teams are almost open about it at this point. So what do you think should be done about these kinds of situations in the future?

Since WhatIfSports doesn't have a "neutral court" option for the NBA, I decided to make each matchup a 2-3-2 best-of-7 series to lessen the impact of HCA (home teams win 60% of the time in any 1 game, but only 53.2% in a 7-game series). Here are the opening-round series from Pool C (click on series links for game-by-game box scores):

Since WhatIfSports doesn't have a "neutral court" option for the NBA, I decided to make each matchup a 2-3-2 best-of-7 series to lessen the impact of HCA (home teams win 60% of the time in any 1 game, but only 53.2% in a 7-game series). Here are the opening-round series from Pool B (click on series links for game-by-game box scores):

This is basically a big data dump, but I thought I'd share the thought process & methodology involved. The premise is to find players whose teams won more postseason games than they were "supposed to" based on their regular season winning %'s and those of their playoff opponents (if this sounds familiar, you may have seen this Doug Drinen post, which Google found for me about halfway through the creation of this post)...

Since WhatIfSports doesn't have a "neutral court" option for the NBA, I decided to make each matchup a 2-3-2 best-of-7 series to lessen the impact of HCA (home teams win 60% of the time in any 1 game, but only 53.2% in a 7-game series). Here are the opening-round series from Pool D (click on series links for game-by-game box scores):

Since WhatIfSports doesn't have a "neutral court" option for the NBA, I decided to make each matchup a 2-3-2 best-of-7 series to lessen the impact of HCA (home teams win 60% of the time in any 1 game, but only 53.2% in a 7-game series). Here are the opening-round series from Pool A (click on series links for game-by-game box scores):

Two weeks ago, I posted about the most dominant NBA teams of all time over the course of the entire season, and the results basically featured the usual suspects: the '96 Bulls, the '71 Bucks, the '86 Celtics, etc. However, I didn't have the 2001 Lakers on the list because they weren't dominant for the entire season -- because of some injuries (and because they felt they could "flip the switch" on when they really needed to), L.A. sleepwalked through the regular season, winning "just" 56 games after scorching the league to the tune of 67 in 2000 (they had to rattle off 8 straight at the end of the season to take the Pacific by a single game over Sacramento). They finished the regular season as the 2nd seed in the West behind San Antonio, and had the league's 6th-best SRS, hardly the stuff of a juggernaut... But in the playoffs, they were indeed able to flip the switch, unleashing a ridiculously dominant performance against Portland (#5 in SRS), Sacramento (#2), San Antonio (#1), and finally Philadelphia (#7), a run marred only by a single defeat in Game 1 of the Finals.

As much fun as the next few weeks will be, I think we can all acknowledge that the NCAA Tournament field does not represent the 64 best D-I basketball teams in the country (nor does it represent the 64 most "accomplished" teams in the land, however you want to define that). Automatic bids to teams from small conferences give the tourney a feeling of equality and tiny schools a chance to shine on a big stage, but the most talented team in the NIT field would still be favored by a wide margin against many of the NCAA Tourney's lower seeds. I'm not complaining about this reality, mind you, and I certainly don't begrudge the NCAA for giving an opportunity to small-conference and mid-major teams. But do you ever wonder what the NCAA field would look like if it did only include the 64 "best" or "most accomplished" teams in the nation?